


The Winding Paths We Weave

by hollow_echos



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 18:16:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2821613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollow_echos/pseuds/hollow_echos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly Carpenter's journey through the world of magic hasn't been exactly what she's expected, but she's come a long way and has a great distance yet to go. A peek into her development from budding wizard to present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winding Paths We Weave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessalae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessalae/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide Jessalae!

Every wizard starts their journey somewhere. Most tales I’ve heard aren’t gradual things where a budding practitioner of magic is gently shepherded into their newfound power with grace and elegance.

 

No, we are ones for grandiose entrances, pyrotechnics, bold threats, and promises kept.  We don’t do things half way, and I, in my early beginnings, was no different. If I was going to dig a hole, it was going to be a few miles deep.

 

Wizard or warlock? Harry would assert the first; the White Council would point fingers to the second.  That shoving match was to be my entrance into this world. Harry against the Council, as it’s played out again so many times since.

 

I stood there and watched a man I hardly knew battle for my life in a ring of the most powerful wizards in the world, all prepared to declare my doom and cast the first stone.

 

Impossible odds, right? I didn’t expect to leave that ill-fated meeting.  It’s the type of odds Harry does best. Never bet against him. I didn’t expect to leave that space alive, and yet I did.

 

When it came time for me to fall into step behind this wizard as his apprentice, I didn’t know what to expect.

 

He was a family friend, a person I’d grew up beneath the watchful gaze of. He seemed kind, but the fire in his voice in that meeting made the hair on the back of my neck rise and an echo of that heat roll through me. He wasn’t a person to be messed with. He was the person to whom I was then bound for some indeterminate length of time, and I thrilled at the prospect.

 

\-------

 

“Of course you can say that! I’ve seen you bring buildings down around you when you were angry enough. Not everyone has the same amount of raw power at their beck and call like you Harry!” I snapped at him.

 

I could see him biting the insides of his cheeks to prevent a laugh from bubbling up. The creases at the corners of his eyes gave it away. “You’re as stubborn as I am, you know? You think you’ve got it all figured out.”

 

“I know that after an hour of of trying to dodge the snowballs you been chucking at me that this is a pointless exercise.”

 

He scooped up another handful of snow and started forming it into a sphere. “I heartily disagree. Snowball fights are fabulous fun. And I never quite tire of seeing Mouse try to find a snowball in a field of snow.”

 

The corner of my lip crept up just a bit at that. “He’s a smart dog, he’s going to surprise you one of these days and drop one at your feet.”

 

Mouse stopped sniffing around the yard just long enough to raise his head in a toothy grin and wag his tail at the mention.

 

Harry lobbed a snowball gently in Mouse’s general direction. The hound leapt up in the air to catch it, sending bits of snow flying everywhere. “See, he’s having fun too. That’s two against one, we keep at it.”

 

I sighed, slipping my hands into my pockets for a brief respite from the cold. “I don’t understand this. I’ve read all of the books you’ve assigned me. I understand the principles of how a shield works and I still can’t make one.”

 

“You can read every book ever written about music, that doesn’t mean you’ll pick up an instrument and play a masterpiece out of the gate. Knowledge is the foundation, where we build up from there is based on practice, repetition, and patience.”

 

“I have no patience,” I grumbled.

 

“Well, we’ll work on that too then.”

 

“You have no patience either, Harry.”

 

Another snowball came speeding in my direction. It darted past my non-existent shield and connected with my arm. “Well maybe we’ll find it somewhere along the way together.”

 

“I think that would be a miracle,”

 

“Not my department, per se, but I think we both know someone who could put in a request with the Big Guy Upstairs.”

 

\-------

 

It wasn’t a pretty alley. Although in Chicago, I don’t think there is such thing as a tidy alley. Mythical creatures? Yes, that I could believe. A clean alley in this urban center?

 

A person would have better luck trying to charm the Merlin to bed. God knows getting laid would maybe help that man loosen up and remove that particular thorn from Harry’s and my side. Or at least wipe clear the target that man has painted on our backs.

 

“Do we really have to wait down here all night, Harry?”

 

“It’s not always a glamorous job, padawan.”

 

“I know, but does it always have to be quite this smelly? Seriously, there’s a Chinese joint around the corner that dumps their leftovers in the dumpster back here. I’m never getting the stink out of these clothes.”

 

“The sacrifices we make for the next paycheck, kid.”

 

I sighed. “You’d be singing a different tune if that precious duster of your wasn’t warded against everything including these potent odors. It won’t linger on you.”

 

He chuckled. “Well, then it should give you ample motivation to learn that particular trick yourself. We need to get into that building, but the hired goons are looping by every few minutes like clockwork. I could set something on fire, but that wouldn’t be very good for the whole ‘quietly’ part of the exercise, which is kind of the point.”

 

I rolled my eyes and sent a thread of magic drifting out into the street. Harry was an elephant in a china store; don’t put him anywhere you didn’t want things broken. There was certainly a use for that sort of magic, but not always.

 

A car alarm pierced the quiet spring night. A pair of guards came sprinting toward the noise, clearing us an unopposed path to the building.

 

He turned and looked at me, eyebrow raised. “You do that? Who taught you that one?”

 

I chuffed. “What’s to learn? That’s an almost nightly occurrence in my household every time I’m trying to practice. The neighbors’ are going mad trying to figure it out. Hexing stuff like that is practically second nature now.”

 

“That was…subtle.”

 

I trotted out in front of him, making for the building. “I know you enjoy it, but you don’t always have to blow something up on a mission.”

 

\-------

 

“For everything there is a season.”

 

No. No. Not this. I couldn’t I can’t.

 

“It’s my daughter, Molly. I have to. And I know it’s not fair to ask this of you.”

 

“I could change this, I could make sure it doesn’t happen.” I whispered.

 

He’s old. Too old for me, that has been pounded into my head again and again. And yet, somehow, despite the life he’s led, the trials and impossible scenarios he’s faced, he found a way to look even older in that moment. There’s a weariness in his eyes reflected in the candlelight.

 

“I know that. And I trust you, Molly, to honor my wishes in this. She’s my daughter. I’m backed into a corner with one way out and I’m going to save my child.”

 

I bit my lip. What about me? I wanted to ask. You’ve shown me the way through this wilderness where a monster lurks behind every tree ready to snap my spine or sever a limb for sheer sadistic pleasure. Don’t I matter enough that you wouldn’t abandon me?

 

I can’t do this.

 

“Okay.” The word bubbled from my throat before I could smother it. I never could say no.

 

Not to him.

 

\-------

 

You live in someone’s shadow for so long and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to stand to face the heat of the sun without that buffer. Harry was that shield. For me against the White Council, for this entire city against the dark spirits that waited for their opening.

 

They found it. When Harry died, fear of his legacy kept them at bay for awhile. Fear that maybe his death was just a rumor, that maybe he was coming back.

 

A person’s legacy cannot last forever, though, and even those rumors ebbed bit by bit. The disappearances of children, bodies found mangled beyond what a human hand could ever do, and no Dresden, wizard of the White Council appeared.

 

I know what he’d expect of me. He was grooming me for my role in this. And yes, I thought I might have a few hundred years before that responsibility was mine to shoulder. We wizards live long lives in the rare occurrence where we don’t meet some violent end. Harry wasn’t so lucky.

 

So I became the Rag Lady for this city. It was one of those chapters in my life that I want to shut behind a door somewhere and never revisit it, but it’s a part of my history I am forced to acknowledge. There were people I hurt; there were people I killed.

 

Harry was the moral one, always. At the end, even he was forced to step across a line that he had strived to live his entire life behind. I don’t have the firepower he has, the raw strength, the personality that makes people take a step or three back. But I know how to get things done in my own way.

 

A carefully placed illusion can be as deadly as a blast of hellfire.

 

It wasn’t pretty. I know that. But it got Harry’s city, _my_ city, through until Harry stepped back into the scene and helped shoulder the burden. I’ve done some awful things, but the people I care for, the city I care for, made it through. I would do it again.

 

\-------

 

I thought it was going to be just me. I could live with the decisions I had made.

 

 I blazed ahead into a wilderness without his steady presence in my life, without knowing I didn’t have to look to make sure someone was covering my back in a fight. He was always there, until he wasn’t.

 

I forged myself into the weapon I needed to be. Murphy’s eyes darkened when I crossed her path. I know Butters had a whole list of the people he thought I had killed. They waged the fight on the right side of justice, on the moral side of the line.

 

I picked up the fight where they dared not venture and forced those many enemies back. They would fear me as they feared the mere mention of Harry’s name.

 

And then he was back, not in the flesh, no, but a ghost can past judgment the same as any living flesh and blood spirit ever could. I saw that fear in his eyes, the flash of sadness at what I had become.

 

I didn’t have a mirror where I lived during those months, but I saw all I needed to see reflected in his gaze. Fear, sadness, blame, horror. I was all of those things in his eyes.

 

We didn’t have the time to sort out all the pieces. As is always the case where Harry is concerned, time is at a premium. In the time we might’ve taken to sit down and chat, people would die. So we moved along, we stopped the bad guys and made it through, and then he was gone again.

 

\-------

 

There is a line in the sand. I blazed right past it after Harry was gone the first time. I set aside much of the values he had spent so many years instilling in me and I became the sort of something we would put down if we found it prowling our streets.

 

When he left the second time, I made a commitment to honoring his memory. I was his apprentice, he had a daughter that would never know him, but I was the person left on this earth that would carry his torch forward into the future and honor the person he had taught me to be.

 

I burned the rags. I earned the respect of the Svartalves and received an apartment so lavish I feared it seemed nearly obscene. Murphy came back around to regarding me as ally, rather than potential enemy. Rather than a madwoman a step away from turning everyone around her inside out. I fought aside them fighting in the ways I should’ve been fighting from the beginning.

 

 I took Harry’s daughter for walks in the park when I could find the time. I told her stories of the person her father had been. They may seem like fanciful fairytales, but we had lived every one. I would make sure she grew up to know the man her father had been.

 

\-------

 

And then he came back again. Harry had survived insurmountable odds. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I showed him into my apartment, and yes, there was that flutter in the pit of my stomach, the fear of a mentor seeing what you had become and being disappointed once again.

 

I told him that clothes in his size could be found in the room in the back. The room that was his for as long as he wanted it.

 

“Did you think I couldn’t take care of myself?” he queried.

 

I shrugged. “Of course not, but you know. I guess that maybe you shouldn’t have to. You were there when I needed you. I figured it was my turn now.”

 

I broke eye contact before he could see the emotion bubbling up. He could always read me to well.

 

“I’m impressed, grasshopper.”

 

Three words. Every bit of effort I’d spent crawling back up from the depths to which I had fallen was validated with those three simple words.

 

\-------

 

A lot happened after that. The sort of stuff that I don’t bat an eye at anymore – near death experiences, mass carnage, somehow pulling out a victory by the skin of our teeth. But we made it, and that was what mattered.

 

Yes, I ended up with the mantle of the Winter Lady, and I still wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to feel about that. That hadn’t been in any mental script that I had prepared for my life (although Mab informed me that it had been one of her contingency plans for quite some time, the ruthless bitch. Is it better or worse for me, that my…Queen? Mother? Whatever the hell she is, that she’s the scariest bitch I know?). The Queen of Winter had millennia on me, and I’m sure that I’ll learn a few things from her along the way.

 

She was a snake, a shark, a predator with pointy teeth she’d mask behind a thin veneer of a smile. I wouldn’t forget any of those things. Harry was still my mentor, my moral compass. The Winter Knight and the Winter Lady. I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of one another going forward.

 

And that’s the crux of it, is it not? Every wizard starts her journey somewhere. It’s usually sudden, violent, and certainly a reflection of the many experiences they will have in the years to follow. It’s certainly proved true for me. But what matters is the company you keep, the people who travel on that journey with you, and knowing you have a person that you will both support as a comrade and can depend on as a teammate.

 

The feast we have been summoned to tonight is supposed to be a celebration of some pagan festival or another. Rather, an opportunity for the many creatures of Faery to jostle for power and control. Two elves take to the dance floor in a duel of sorts, circling one another. As long as blood is not spilt upon the ground in this sacred space, few things are prohibited. The taller of the two elves spirals inward and knocks the other to the ground with a tremendous force. I hear a sickening snap that makes me wince. A howl of approval rises from the watching crowd, their yearning for violence temporarily sated.

 

Harry emerges from the doorway across from me, dressed in a finely tailored outfit that makes it obvious that Mab had someone else arrange his wardrobe. More than half the battles fought in this realm are based on appearances and perceived threats. Impressions are important.

 

He shakes his head at the carnage below. “Already at it and the drinks haven’t even started to flow, color me impressed.”

 

“They’re a bunch of spoiled children fighting for attention, it shouldn’t surprise you in the least,” I offer up with a chuckle. “Shall we do this?” I ask.

 

He nods, offering me an arm. The Winter Knight and the Winter Lady. They weren’t the titles we picked or the one’s we expected, but they were the ones we were dealt.

Together, we descend to the floor below.

 

-The End-

 


End file.
